Stogumber's Children

Education

Stogumber had some sort of school or schools  for a long time prior to the founding of present C of E school, and there continued to be more than one school in the village until the end of the 1800s. As early as 1769 the parish was paying someone to teach the poor children to read, but there were also a series of private schools for the wealthier. There was a school at Haddon House which took boarding as well as day pupils, a Miss Elizabeth Symons ran an establishment somewhere else in the village and a girls school at Mill Cottage was recorded in the late 1800s.

However we have to be a bit careful when we start talking about schools because these places were not necessarily what we would think of as a school nowadays – that is to say their primary purpose wasn’t necessarily education or certainly not education in the sense that we would understand it – but rather they were often a sort of childminding service;  somewhere that young children were sent to keep them safe and out of harm’s way while the parents and older siblings got on with work. Such places were colloquially known as dame schools and took children in from an early age.

One of the striking things about the early school register is how young some of the children were that were admitted. In July 1874 for instance Fred Hill had his first day at Stogumber school – having just reached the age of 3; in April 1877 John Perry enrolled who had just turned two; and in June 1897 Cecil Hollis started school at the ripe old of one year and 10 months. Children of this age clearly weren’t being sent off to learn the 3 rs. Children left school at an earlier age than they do now, but they also started it earlier.

Perhaps the first ‘proper’ school in the village was that established by Baptist’s in the late 1700s. This was subsequently recorded with both day and boarding pupils; one of the boarding pupils was a 5 year old girl from Halsway called Mary Duddridge. In 1818 it was reported that “the poorer classes [in Stogumber] are without sufficient means of educating their children but are anxiously desirable of giving them some education and find it in the school of Dissenters which is well watched over”. This suggests that as well as being well run it may also have been free.

The parish church established a school a little later - in 1801 - but this seems to have run into some sort of difficulty and was poorly attended, at least in the early decades of the century.
                       
In the light of the reputation of dame schools you would be forgiven for thinking that the great push to expand education for children at the start of the 19th Century must have been motivated by a desire to introduce a proper education to children – the three Rs. But it wasn’t. In fact quite the opposite. It was widely believed that educating  children could be dangerous.

This is what one MP had to say in 1807 –

It will lead the lower classes to despise their lot in life. Instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious employments to which their rank in society has destined them; instead of teaching them subordination it will render them factious and refractory, it will enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications against Christianity'

Although this view might seem somewhat extreme, it was by no means untypical. Even those who were the leading educational reformers adopted a similar view –  this is what Hannah Moore had to say who had established a series of what were considered model schools in Mendip

'my plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn on weekdays such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor'

Or another leading reformer Andrew Bell

it is not proposed that the children of the poor be educated in an expensive manner, or all of them be taught to write and to cipher. Utopian scheme for the universal diffusion of general knowledge would soon realize the fable of the belly, and the other members of the body, and confound that distinction of ranks and classes of society on which the general welfare hinges; there is a risk of elevating by an indiscriminate education the minds of those doomed to the drudgery of daily labour above their condition and thereby rendering them discontented and unhappy in their lot'

This is born out from what is known about schooling in Devon where three quarters of primary schools in the early decades of the 1800s taught only reading, with no writing and no arithmetic. No doubt the situation in Somerset was not dissimilar.

The reason that the authorities and the better classes were keen to instrument some sort of education in children wasn’t so much to teach them to read and write and get on in the world, or to better themselves through learning. It was so that they might be schooled in morality. The existing schools were thought to be deficient not because they taught only rudimentary reading but because they did not attempt to instil any sort of moral values, and in particular because they  did not teach Christian - and specifically Church of England Christian values.  This attitude comes out in a letter written by Charles Rowcliffe in response to an appeal for funds for a new schoolroom for children of the poor in the parish. Charles Rowcliffe was a solicitor who lived in Wayshill, the house of the late Mrs Farrer.

 ‘I would be among the first to rejoice at such a consummation, or any other, that would really improve the disgraceful state of immorality of the parish at present’.

The background to this groundswell of concern amongst those at the top of society was both the huge increase in the number of children which occurred in the early decades of the century which I have already described, and also the concomitant rise in poverty. There was a widespread feeling that the country was going to the dogs, and a real fear of social unrest even of rebellion or revolution –the French revolution was still within living memory and the early 1800s were punctuated by a series of other revolutions throughout Europe. Nearer to home the Luddites were destroying new types of manufacturing machinery which they thought were throwing them out of work, and their rural equivalents were terrorising rural areas with a campaign of direct action against mechanisation in the countryside.

It was against this background that the National Society for Promoting Religious Education was established in 1811 – an arm of the Church of England which aimed to found a Church of England school in every parish in England and Wales. Its founding principal was simple

That the National Religion should be made the foundation of National Education, and should be the first and [the] chief thing taught to the poor, according to the excellent Liturgy and Catechism provided by our Church.

This society founded Stogumber’s national school in 1833 – called a National school because it was founded by the national society – and it is of course the only school in the parish which is still with us now.

It has to be said that the early records of the village school do indicate that it took its founding principles very seriously indeed. The children seemed to have been pretty much daily drilled in scripture and learning their catechism and were frequently taken to church for services. The watchful eye of the vicar extended well beyond the church into the school as well and there were frequent instances of children being punished by the school mistress for misbehaving in church or even for running in the churchyard.

The curate who was standing in for the non resident vicar was very much involved with the management and direction of the school. Either he himself, or else his wife, or his daughter, or sometimes all three together, visited the school on  a daily basis, sometimes more than once. They took  lessons as well as offering plentiful advice and criticism – often to the evident exasperation of the headmistress as she recorded in her  daily entries in the school log book

This promotion of a particular brand of Christianity  was not without its opponents. Children in Stogumber were having to attend church daily during Lent for example, and of course not all children in the village were members of the Church of England. Stogumber had a very large Baptist community, and evidently there was not always complete accord on the way things were going. On Baptist high days and holidays for instance, the Church of England national school quite often had to shut due to the low numbers attending.

This factionalism within the parish echoed a wider debate which was taking place nationally about the role of the church in education. By the 1860s the earlier opposition to the principle for education for the poor had abated. It wasn’t so much that there was any longer disagreement in parliament about the need to educate children, or even disagreement with the principle that the state should fund this to some extent. The sticking point was who was going to provide the education – The Liberal party was very opposed to the idea that national taxation might be used to support Church schools – the church on the rates as they characterised it; non conformists and Catholics were equally opposed to the idea that the church of England should be funded by taxpayers to provide education, and the whole debate about the provision of education by the state became mired and stalled in this morass. Consequently the matter was not fully resolved until the final years of the century.

A second problem was that whilst parliament could agree on the need to educate the children of the poor, it was another matter altogether to convince the parents and the children themselves of this. Parents did not have any objection in principal to their children attending school, but they  were simply not in position  where they could manage without the help of their children to support the family; and there were certain peak times of the year - and indeed peak times of the week such as wash day for girls - when they simply had to have their children at home and schooling had to come second.

It was in recognition of this that parliament was very slow to introduce the requirement for compulsory school attendance – it was almost certainly  correctly believed that a law passed to this effect would simply be unworkable, and it wasn’t until 1880 that attendance finally became compulsory up to the age of 10.

Even then however, the battle was very far from won – parents now found themselves faced with a double whammy - not only did they stand to lose a pair of helping hands, but to add insult to injury they were required to pay for attendance at school. Perhaps not surprisingly many simply didn’t comply. To give you an idea of the scale of non attendance – in the 1880s there were 10,000 cases of prosecution for non attendance at school making it the second most common criminal offence in England – the first was drunkenness. And these were just the cases which came to court which were the minority – many an excuse was offered with probably the most common being that the children had no shoes to wear that day so couldn’t get to school.

Even by the standards of the time, Stogumber seems to have languished near the bottom of the league when it came to non attendance. I know one of the things that strikes people about the village school in Victorian times is the large number of children in attendance – up to 140 or so. But this isn’t that surprising when you think how many more people and especially how many more children there were living in the parish.  What I think is jaw dropping however is the attendance rate – the occasions on which the school had its full complement of children or anything like its full complement were the exception and not the rule. There were a myriad of reasons for them not coming as the selection of entries from the school log book listed opposite shows.

New Building

Things might have been expected to improve after 1871 when the present school building was instituted. Even this however bought its tribulations

May 1st 1871
School opened after a fortnight’s holiday. Obliged to assemble in a barn the schoolroom being enlarged. Found that many children had not heard of the commencement of school
Barn very inconvenient and very cold; A few children absent on account of their parents being afraid to let them come to such a cold place
Eliza Lovell obliged to teach a class at home, the barn not large enough to hold all the scholars
Children very inattentive – watching the birds building in the roof; very few children present except infants
Children very talkative and listless, so many things to attract their attention in the barn – rats and birds etc
Barn so horribly cold. Children unable to write at the desk, the wind blows their leaves about too much
The Barn still so cold. Children’s’ attention still attracted by the birds and cats
           
In fact they stayed in the barn for the whole of the term and did not move into the new school building until September 1871, but by the end of term only the infants were still attending the school. The rest had absented themselves either because of whortle berry picking or because they  had simply given up coming.

The school eventually became free as well as compulsory in 1891

Today we have broken up for the harvest holidays – four weeks. Notice has been given of the establishment of a Boot Club after the holidays so that the school fees formerly paid may be saved and used to buy boots, and that the excuse “No boots” may not so often be given as a reason for absence in the future.

After the holidays this will be a Free School.

The problems of attendance still did not disappear because parents still needed the help of their children at home. Even in the early decades of the last century there were still children in the village who were regularly kept home to help their parents in their work.

Extracts from Stogumber School Log Book illustrating the many reasons for absence recorded and the type of work in which children were engaged. 

©Duncan Taylor 2009